Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French. Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage.
He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism. He was president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, and a literary award are named in his honor. Foundation is a collection of five short stories, which were first published together That would have been unfathomable.
One admission from his autobiography tells the tale best:. I incautiously told him of the various books I had in progress, and he advised me strongly not to write so busily. I was rather glum after that meal and gave the matter much thought afterward. By the time he came back to the first project, he found the writing flowed easily once again. You can also use this tactic with books to improve your overall reading yield, switching between them as your mood and energy dictates.
If anything besides sheer productivity defined Asimov, it was a thirst for knowledge. I had to keep a program of self-education in process. And, as I went on to discover, each time I wrote a book on some subject outside my immediate field it gave me courage and incentive to do another one that was perhaps even farther outside the narrow range of my training…I advanced from chemical writer to science writer, and, eventually, I took all of my learning for my subject or at least all that I could cram into my head — which, alas, had a sharply limited capacity despite all I could do.
As I did so, of course, I found that I had to educate myself. I had to read books on physics to reverse my unhappy experiences in school on the subject and to learn at home what I had failed to learn in the classroom — at least up to the point where my limited knowledge of mathematics prevented me from going farther. When the time came, I read biology, medicine, and geology. I collected commentaries on the Bible and on Shakespeare. I read history books. Everything led to something else. I became a generalist by encouraging myself to be generally interested in all matters.
As I look back on it, it seems quite possible that none of this would have happened if I had stayed at school and had continued to think of myself as, primarily, a biochemist…[so] I was forced along the path I ought to have taken of my own accord if I had had the necessary insight into my own character and abilities. Still interested?
It hurts less when something flops. Diversity is insurance of the mind. I had a wonderful night. This post originally appeared at Medium. Want more? Charles publishes The Open Circle , a free weekly newsletter to over 10, readers where he deconstructs high-achievers and shares exclusive lessons from his own learning experiments. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content.
Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. By Charles Chu Better Humans. Published January 17, This article is more than 2 years old. Sign me up. It lists items, including 2 wall posters and a calendar which some people might not be inclined to count as "books".
It also lists science fiction anthologies, none of which are entirely by Asimov, and many of which include no stories by him and so some people might be inclined not to count those. There are also books which were almost entirely written by someone else the Superquiz books, From Harding to Hiroshima, the Book of Facts which Asimov counted because he had an extensive role in the editing of the book.
Some books were counted more than once if Asimov did extensive work on later editions such as the Biographical Encyclopedia. And, of course, Asimov recycled many of his stories and essays so that they appeared in more than one collection, and some books are nothing but recyclings of older books. Alternatively, if we included both novels and individual short stories while again still not counting anthologies , how many stories would Asimov have written? I understand that there always be some grey area as to what everything counts as, but I'd happy to accept any consistent counting method used which meets the above criteria and produces a number of novels and an overall number of stories.
Every other published work of his SF output appears to be a collection of his short stories or an omnibus that can mix novels and short stories. Because of the great amount of re-use of individual stories across these it is hard to give a good answer how many disjunct collections there might be.
I actually went through the ISFDb search for short fiction and, removing the 36 short stories in the 5 above "novels," duplicates, variations, non-genre stories, extracts, etc. This list doesn't include the " Black Widowers " stories 67 in all that have their own set of 6 collections, however it does include the 8 Azazel stories published after the collection Azazel was released and not included in it. As to the number of unique collections, much of Asimov's early work appears only in a single collection up until the time later in his career when omnibus collections started to be created.
Note that there are only 10 stories missing to , about half of which were never reprinted. Things get spottier after that, as new stories show up in collections like Omnibus Even More of the Complete Rest of the Robots along with the 67th republishing of the early stories from I, Robot.
Since I've got this tabulated already, these are the short stories that appear in the novel-like collections:. For the stories that comprise the Foundation trilogy I'm using the names as published in those books, instead of the names Campbell used for their original publication in Astounding , because they are far better known under the latter names.
Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
0コメント